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Changed surnames with immigration

27 December 2018, 10:28 PM

I have a large Swedish branch in my tree. Which their naming system is hard enough to follow. How would some of you recommend I handle the name change during their immigration? In Sweden for example one surname is Svensson, which was changed to Swanson once immigrated to the US. Would you recommend using Swanson as the "official" name in Reunion. Would you then put the Svensson surname in the Alias field? Or would you put Jonas (Svensson) Swanson all in the "official" line? I can talk myself into both methods depending on the day.

I have a large Swedish branch in my tree. Which their naming system is hard enough to follow. How would some of you recommend I handle the name change during their immigration? In Sweden for example one surname is Svensson, which was changed to Swanson once immigrated to the US. Would you recommend using Swanson as the "official" name in Reunion. Would you then put the Svensson surname in the Alias field? Or would you put Jonas (Svensson) Swanson all in the "official" line? I can talk myself into both methods depending on the day.

Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I personally would always like to see both name versions together -- either with parenthesis or slash.

Comment

I have a large Swedish branch in my tree. Which their naming system is hard enough to follow. How would some of you recommend I handle the name change during their immigration? In Sweden for example one surname is Svensson, which was changed to Swanson once immigrated to the US. Would you recommend using Swanson as the "official" name in Reunion. Would you then put the Svensson surname in the Alias field? Or would you put Jonas (Svensson) Swanson all in the "official" line? I can talk myself into both methods depending on the day.

Any thoughts and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

In my family, whenever someone's surname at birth is different than the name they go by, I put both surnames in the "Last Name" field, with the birth name in square brackets followed by the later name, e.g. [Riznikove] Reese. This allows the person to be found by a "find" on either name. If I can document a name change upon immigration, or a legal name change, I attach that as a source. If not, I will make a note explaining why the change was made.

Comment

I have a large Swedish branch in my tree. Which their naming system is hard enough to follow. How would some of you recommend I handle the name change during their immigration?

My personal preference is to use the standard name fields for their Swedish name, as found in the birth record, and then use the "Alias/AKA" Fact field to enter the name they used in America. It's true that this approach will result in the Americanized name not appearing in any report indexes, but it will be searchable in the database and in any PDF or HTML reports that include the "Alias/AKA" Fact. It may depend on how you have previously treated other types of name changes that have occurred for people whose name varied over their lifespan even for non-immigrants. Do you want your charts and reports to reflect people's birth names or the name they were last known by? Including multiple names in the standard name fields will place those names in indexed reports but, as pointed out by "fjvanbodegom," you must never use the slash as a separator character.

Comment

I have people whose name was spelled differently before the standardization of spellings in France (i.e. Buquez / Bucquet). What I do is enter the name that was used at the time the person lived with the alternate spelling in Notes. I never noticed an Alias Fact. Thank you for pointing that out, very useful. I do the same thing for place names that have changed. I use the name that was used at the time of the record in question.